(Originally published in Ishmael Reed’s Konch Magazine, 3/2016)

My Russian-born great-grandfather would come home every day after work and lower the shades while sitting alone in the front room. Then he would put on tefilin, the ritual phylacteries of the orthodox jew, and recite the evening prayers. I can picture him carefully re-wrapping the leather straps around the black boxes containing sacred inscriptions and replacing them in their velvet pouch. Then I see him going to his closet, kissing the tefilin and returning them to their shelf, and bending over to pick up the box that contained his dancing shoes…because Grampa Louie loved to Rhumba.

He wasn’t alone. Ever since the Don Azpiazu’s Cuban Orchestra debuted Moises Simón’s “El Manicero” (The Peanut Vendor) in New York in 1930 (and shortly thereafter in Paris), the world was consumed with “rhumba” fever. For the record, “rhumba” was the US recording industry’s name for any and all cuban dance rhythms, including the son, the rumba, the guaracha and even the bolero. The recent advent and popularization of the radio helped spread the “rhumba” far and near, as did cheaper record players playing 78rpm records. If horse/used car salesmen like Grampa Louie loved the Rhumba, so did the avant garde: surrealist movement intellectuals in Paris were early supporters of what is in essence Afro-Cuban Jazz. According to Professor Timothy Brennan, Tristan Tzara, the founder of Dadaism, had an extensive collection of “rhumba” records, and surrealist figures Robert Desnos and Nino Frank loved Latin American art and music.

By 1940, over 90 percent of American homes owned at least one radio. Before the television, people used to pull up the rug after dinner and dance. So great was the North American passion for dancing that by 1946 Arthur and Kathryn Murray had over 200 studios in major cities throughout the United States, and a business that grossed $2 million in 1941 was grossing over $12 million by 1946. According to Ralph Giordano’s “Social Dancing in America: A History and Reference”, in 1939, a Los Angeles Jitterbug contest attracted over 100,000. “Dancing was so popular that over 2,000 war production plants nationwide had facilities for dancing during lunch or breaks.”

With respect to Cuban music, tourism to Cuba was also an important factor: the first international airline service ever offered from the United States (1920) was Aeromarine Airways “flying boat” flights to Cuba. In 1927, Panamerican Airlines began regular flights to Havana. Throughout the period, Havana continued to be an important port for passenger ship travelers: before transatlantic airplane travel (1939), boats passed through Havana on the way to and from New York City and other key ports. While Cuban music was impacting popular music in the US, the impact of US culture on Cuba was mixed at best. Langston Hughes, who visited Cuba at this time, stated that tourism to the island from the US, especially by southerners (many came with the army, others worked for US corporations in Cuba) resulted in many of the hotels that catered to US tourists suddenly not allowing Cuban mulattos to enter. The same was true for many nightclubs. According to documents relating to the involvement of the North American Mafia in Cuba, bordellos with black and mulata prostitutes were established in Havana to look exactly like antebellum southern plantations.

Enter Cugie

Before Tito Puente (or Pérez Prado) was the Mambo King, Xavier Cugat was King of the Rhumba. Xavier Cugat was born in Catalonia, Spain in 1900, and in 1905 his parents immigrated to Cuba. In 1915 his family immigrated to the United States. This was the decade of the Tango craze in the US and Europe. Cugat, trained on the violin, founded his first band, The Gigolos, in 1921. The early Tango King moved to Los Angeles in 1927, where he worked as a caricaturist and cartoonist for the Los Angeles Times. Hollywood was where Cugat would get his big break, and he was soon leading the Tango band at the Ambassador Hotel’s Coconut Grove Club. By 1932 he is already in Manhattan, fronting his own Xavier Cugat orchestra at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. By the mid-1930s Cugat’s watered-down Cuban and Latin music with English lyrics made him one of the biggest bandleaders in the country. In 1934 he co-starred with Benny Goodman on the weekly NBC radio program “Let’s Dance”. By 1936 he was a regular in Hollywood movies, which consistently included Cuban and Latin musical numbers throughout the period.

Latin music was hot in New York in the 1930s, and Cugat sold millions of recordings for Columbia records. Latin dance clubs had their own listing in The New Yorker magazine’s “Goings On About Town” section. The music that Cugat and other society bandleaders recorded is generally considered to have been “crossover dreck”, but was massively popular in its time. One modern reviewer described Cugat’s 1950s recording of the song “Babalú” this way: “Xavier Cugat takes a hymn to Chango and turns it into a Looney Tunes soundtrack. You can almost see the cartoon cannibals dancing around the cauldron of boiling missionaries during his silly nonsensical “rap.”” High society clubs that presented Cugat-type fare, such as the Waldorf Astoria, Taft Hotel or Stork Club in Manhattan were, as a rule, segregated, and that included musicians. Scholar Cristobal Diaz Ayala’s final assessment of Cugat and his contemporaries such as Enric Madriguera is that at least they were “excellent musicians who provided great exposure for Latin music in the USA.”

The Conga King

“One, two, three, kick.” In 1933 Desi Arnaz Jr. moved from Santiago de Cuba, in Cuba’s Oriente province, to Miami, Florida. According to his Wikipedia entry, in his memoirs Arnaz said that: “I know of no other country in the world” in which “a sixteen-year-old kid, broke and unable to speak the language” could attain the success he had. Hundreds of hotels and resorts were built in the 1930s in Miami Beach, giving the city its still distinct Art Deco district. This area, along with New York and Chicago, became a center for Latin music nightlife. According to Josephine Powell, Desi Arnaz Jr. began playing “foxtrots with a rumba beat” in Miami, and at some point caught the eye of Xavier Cugat. Cugat, who was known never to miss a novelty or marketing opportunity, saw a doozie in the handsome, light-skinned, Conga-beating Arnaz.

He was proved right. Arnaz was a huge hit, becoming “Mr. Conga” while fronting Cugat’s orchestra. The conga was a national smash: in 1938 Cab Calloway recorded “The Congo-Conga”, and in 1940 “Goin’ Conga”. The “Conga” rhythm is a watered-down version of a Cuban carnaval rhythm played by a comparsa. A comparsa, described by Alejo Carpentier as an “itinerant ballet”, was a group of 30 or more (Afro-Cuban) dancers, singers, percussionists and horn players that paraded together through the streets during the annual carnavales.

Arnaz became a broadway star, acting alongside Puerto Rican dancer and singer Diosa Costello in the musical “Too Many Girls”. “Too Many Girls” was made into a movie in 1940, and Arnaz appeared in many others, eventually going on to star in the most watched show in US Television history, “I Love Lucy” with his wife, comedienne Lucille Ball.

But going back to 1936-’38, the Conga craze’s peak years, Cugat had so many engagements that he made two Xavier Cugat orchestras, with Arnaz leading one while Cugat led the other. There was Arnaz, conga drum strapped to his shoulder, leading the socialites of Miami and New York (and the world over) snaking through the concert halls, hands on shoulders, “One, two, three, kick”, doing the Conga line.

Original caption: Errol Flynn, who has little difficulty performing amazing acrobatic feats before Hollywood cameras, seems a little confused as he goes through a Rhumba routine with Patricia Byrnes, model, and Desi Arnaz, (right), at La Conga, New York night spot. August 5, 1939 New York, New York, USA

Neo-Africa in the Americas

Cuba was one of the first Spanish colonies to begin importing Africans in the early 1500s, and was nearly the last in the hemisphere to end the slave trade (1865) and to abolish slavery (1886). After 1808, imports of Africans to the United States was illegal (though clandestine importation did continue), but thirty years later, the trade in Cuba was thriving, and an estimated 165,000 Africans were imported from 1835-1840. Though Africans of many different nations were imported to the Americas South and North, following Ned Sublette’s scholarship, the two main layers were generally the Kongo/Angolans and the Yoruba of what is roughly today Nigeria and Benin.

Kongo/Angolans refers to a diverse group of Bantu-related peoples, coming from an enormous area that stretches from Cameroon down to Angola, and includes the Central African Republic and Congo (the region is somewhere near a third of the size of the United States). Ned Sublette notes that Kikongo-derived words like ngombe (cattle) and ngubá (peanut) remain in use in Cuba to this day; in the Southern United States we are familiar with the term “goober” for peanut. The presence of an ‘mb’ or ‘ng’ in a word, especially as related to Afro-Latin music, is generally associated with Kongo culture. Thus terms such as mambo, samba, cumbia, merengue, charanga, bomba, tango. Conga. Rumba.

As for the Yoruba, from the 1820s to the 1860s an estimated 275,000 were brought to Cuba. In this case, looking at the example of Brazil is helpful. While Sublette notes that without the Kongo/Angolans there would be no Brazil, period, the Yoruba presence there is also overwhelming. Since at least the 18^th century, ships sailed between Salvador, Bahia and Lagos, Nigeria several times a year carrying clothes, fruits, shells, and other items necessary to practice the Yoruba religion. Or as Yedda Pessoa de Castro has it in “Towards a Comparative Approach of Bantuisms in Iberoamerica,” “This type of trade was destined to meet the demand of the local population as it concerned the products necessary to maintain african religious cults or used in the candomblé houses condemned by the press of that epoch as noisy cults frequented by persons of all classes (ital in cited work).” The Salvador-Lagos line was shut down by the British, colonial masters of Nigeria, after a 1903 cholera outbreak.

Here it is instructive to note the difference between Catholic South and Protestant North America for Africans. Except for New Orleans, with its famous Congo Square, African languages, drums and dances were generally outlawed in British North America. In Latin America, in contrast, the Catholic church considered Africans to be human and capable of salvation through the Catholic faith. Especially in situations like Cuba’s where Europeans were massively outnumbered by Africans, the church was content to make sure that Africans were baptized at birth and read the last rites at death, even as they preserved their African languages, drums and dances in between.

The carnaval and three kings day were central to the continuing transmission of African culture. The three day period leading up to lent on the Catholic calendar was “when slaves and free africans danced in the streets all day.” In colonial times, Africans elected kings and danced in the streets of Cartagena, Colombia and in Mexico in front of Melchior/Baltazar, the Black king from the Christian Epiphany story. The great Cuban musicologist Fernando Ortiz wrote of the carnaval comparsas “in monstrous costumes that marched double file down the street to a rhythm that their leader beat on a frying pan. Periodically, the leader would accelerate the rhythm” and the members of the comparsa would begin “leaping, dancing, climbing up the window grills,” and trying to startle the women who watched the street from inside. Some groups carried a large effigy of a scorpion or a snake that they ritually “killed” at intervals.” The immolation of the snake and the “snake dance” is related to the Dahomeyan snake cult.

…which means that a hundred or so years later, conga-crazy North American and European elites – and defense workers – were doing a Dahomeyan snake dance.

Repression of Everything Afro-Cuban

In the first three decades of the 20^th century and beginning immediately after the war of independence from Spain, some 700,000 Spanish and Canary Islanders immigrated to Cuba. Dr. Cristobal Diaz Ayala provides an answer to this seeming contradiction: “It’s the only case in the world where something like that happened, that after the end of a war, where normally the group that loses the war is kicked out of the country, in this case the Spaniards began arriving to Cuba the following year in greater numbers than were leaving. In the first 30 years of the Republic Spanish immigration to Cuba was greater than in the whole previous century. Why? To whiten Cuba.” Many of these immigrants were the first to leave when the “blacks and reds” took over during the Cuban revolution of 1959, but others did not wait so long. Like Xavier Cugat’s family, for instance.

According to Professor John Chasteen, after Independence the cultural models of Europe and the United States were paramount in the Cuban elite mind. Chasteen notes that “U.S. occupation and subsequent U.S. tutelage constantly reminded the Havana elite of their need to banish “savagery” and “backwardness”, and demonstrate “progress” and “civilization”. It simply would not do, any longer, to have Kokoríkamos climbing window grills and comparsas of “Africans” symbolically immolating giant snakes in the streets.”

Neo-African practices were thus in the crosshairs, especially Afro-Cuban religious practice. Ned Sublette has made the startling point that “Santería”, the syncretization of Yoruba religion with Catholicism, or rather the disguising of Yoruba religion as Catholicism, occurred after the end of slavery. As Cristobal Diaz Ayala told it to Sublette: “Something curious happens: that in the colonial period, Ned, the black people had more freedom to play their drums than they had after Cuba was a republic.” Neo-African music was also suspect. According to Larry Crook: “For the white upper class, the rumba was little more than a barbarian expression of an inferior and primitive culture and was intimately tied to such things as drinking, rowdy and licentious behavior, and crime. The negative associations were taken to such a point that a study of criminology in Cuba, first written in 1906, included a chapter on the rumba.”

The reaction was predictable. So it was that the magnificent comparsas that danced their Neo-African choreographies in lavish costumes throughout Havana were banned. The ban lasted from 1913 to 1937. Yoruba dances were banned starting in 1920. Jordi Pujol notes that a notice in the Diario de la Habana of Septrmber 5, 1921 stated that “the Chief of Police reminds all that you must comply with the ordinance of April 5, 1919, which prohibits the playing of drums and other instruments of African origin, and the movements and phrases that accompany them.” In 1925 the mayor of Santiago de Cuba banned the “conga dance” and bongo and conga playing in the upcoming carnavales. The mayor’s name was Dr. Desiderio Arnaz.

…his son was Desi Arnaz Jr.

While the real rumba was outlawed and its practitioners hauled off to jail for playing the bongo, Cugat and Arnaz made millions playing “rhumbas” at society clubs in New York City, Hollywood, and Miami Beach. It turns out that Desi Arnaz Jr. was hardly a “penniless Cuban immigrant.” Again, according to Wikipedia: “Desi Arnaz was born Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III in Santiago de Cuba to Desiderio Alberto Arnaz (1894-1973) and Dolores de Acha (1896-1988). His father was Santiago’s youngest mayor and then served in the Cuban House of Representatives. His mother, Dolores Acha y de Socias, was one of the most beautiful and prominent women in Latin America, and her father, Alberto, was one of the three original founders of the Bacardi Rum Company. The family owned three ranches, a palatial home and a vacation mansion on a private island in Santiago Bay, Cuba. The 1933 revolution, led by Fulgencio Batista, overthrew the American-backed President Gerardo Machado, landed his father in jail for six months, and stripped his family of its wealth and power… Arnaz and his parents then fled to Miami, Florida.”

Arnaz Sr. was one of Machado’s inner circle, and Machado one of the most corrupt Presidents in Cuban history (which is saying something).

Bruca Maniguá and the real Mr. Babalú

Yo son Carabalí,
Negro de nación.
Sin la libertad,
No puedo vivir.
Mundele acabá,
Con mi corazón.
Tanto maltratá, Cuerpo ta fuiri.

Yenyere bruca maniguá Ah Eh!

I am Carabalí,
Negro born in Africa.
Without liberty,
I can’t live.
The white man has finished
My heart.
So much abuse,
He’s killed my body.

The bush doctor is casting a spell (on the white man)

– Bruca Maniguá by Arsenio Rodriguez (sung by Miguelito Valdés with La Orquesta Casino de la Playa, 1937)

Ignacio Arsenio Travieso Scull (professionally, he used his mother’s maiden name, thus “Arsenio Rodriguez”) was born in 1911 to a family of fifteen in the rural interior of Matanzas province. Arsenio’s family were descended of Kongos, and his grandfather taught him the Palo Monte religion. According to the most popular story, a young Arsenio – it’s not clear at exactly what age, seven, eight, or twelve – poked a mule in the rear with a stick, and received a violent kick to the head. The boy lost his left eye immediately, and the use of his right as well. Alternatively, it is said that he contracted a disease that made him lose his sight. Arsenio seems to have dedicated himself to music after that point, to the benefit of dancers the world over: known later as El Ciego Maravilloso (The Blind Marvel), Arsenio would go on to be called “the father of the Son Montuno” and indeed, “the father of Salsa Music.”

Miguelito Valdés was born to a Spanish father and Mexican (Yucatec Indian) mother and raised in the tough neighborhood of Cayo Hueso in Havana. Cayo Hueso, near the Havana docks, is one of the neighborhoods known as a Cuna de Rumberos – cradle of rumberos – for its proximity to the wharves and its population of dockworkers who banged out rumbas on wooden shipping crates. The Valdes family appear to have been santeros, practicioners of the Yoruba-based Afro-Cuban religion. Miguelito was a handsome “mulato claro” or light mulatto – as he grew, his color would open doors to him that remained shut for many of his friends, something that seemed to cause him much anger in his life.

Miguelito left school at 11 to work as an automobile mechanic. In classic poor hustler style, he became an amateur boxer, winning the amateur welterweight belt in 1929. He was known as the “singing boxer” because he sang his answers when interviewed on the radio. After winning the title, he quit boxing and decided to pursue music full time. In 1937 he and six other members of the Orquesta Los Hermanos Castro left to form an orquesta as a cooperative in which all members would have a stake. The band, which would become the most influential in Latin America in the late 1930s, was called Orquesta Casino de la Playa.

Miguelito and Arsenio had been friends since at least the early ‘30s. In 1937 Miguelito Valdés took a number of Arsenio’s compositions to Casino de la Playa, who recorded “Bruca Manigua” at session for RCA Victor. The RCA sessions, which included numbers like “Dolor cobarde” and “Cachita” proved such a massive success that Diaz Ayala says they “changed the history of Popular Music in the Caribbean.” With respect to “Bruca Manigua”, within two years of the song’s recording by Casino de la Playa it was recorded again by Xavier Cugat in the United States; Cugat’s all-white orchestra played the song – about a bush doctor putting a curse on the white man – to all-white audiences at the Waldorf Astoria. But then, as Ned Sublette astutely points out, this was the age of Surrealism.

Casino de la Playa embarked on their first tour of the Caribbean in 1937, and by 1938 “Cachita”, “Dolor Cobarde”, “Bruca Manigua” and new hits like “Rumba Rumbero” were getting daily play on the radio and were in constant rotation at youthful social gatherings throughout the region. The Orquesta recorded nearly 200 78rpm sides for RCA Victor between 1937 and 1940, among them yet more massive hits like “Babalú” and “Blen Blen Blen”. The 1939 recording of the Margarita Lecuona composition “Babalú (Ayé), would be forever associated with Miguelito Valdés throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, where he was soon – and is still – known as “Mr. Babalú.”

Babalu-Ayé is the Yoruba Orisha of the afflicted, and is associated with Saint Lazarus. He appears depicted as a old man with open sores which are licked by dogs that follow him. In form, “Bruca Maniguá” and “Babalú” are both Afros, a slow, dramatic but bouncy rumba lament. In Miguelito Valdés’ Afros, he sang in character as an Afro-Cuban “Negro de Nación”, using Yoruba or Congo terms in the dialect of the first generation brought from Africa. Like the Son clave (“The Bo Diddley Beat”) and Cha Cha Cha figures in early rock and roll (See Sublette), the Afro also entered and remained part of the popular music world, forming the basis for international hits such as Carlos Santana’s “Black Magic Woman”.

Miguelito is a fascinating figure who was able to present the Afro Cuban themes and rhythms he had grown up with in an authentic manner to audiences that would not have been thought to be open to such content. He had the ability to be passionate and heartfelt, while at times clowning just to the edge of what could be called “tomming”. But he never crossed that line. Many black musicians of the era – most of them close friends of his, some since childhood – have commented on this special role of his, and for the dignity with which he executed it, presenting their music to white people “while dressed in a tuxedo.”

Valdés told interviewer Leo Rosa that “Back in ’38 we were working in Havana, and every time Xavier Cugat came to Havana, he always asked me: “When are you going to join me? I want you in New York… So after four years with the Casino de la Playa Orchestra, I wanted to to make it big. I wanted to go to the big country, to the country of opportunity, which is this one.” Miguelito and pianist Anselmo Sacasas did just that, moving to New York City in 1940. Valdés was an immediate sensation with Cugat, with whom he recorded a new version of “Babalú.”

The upshot is that Miguelito Valdés’ performance on “Babalú” and indeed even his name as “Mr. Babalu” was appropriated wholesale by Desi Arnaz Jr. Arnaz was intimately familiar with Miguelito’s performance, and the two worked together with Xavier Cugat beginning in 1940. Within a few years, Arnaz was singing “Babalú” on the “I Love Lucy” television show, and was universally known as “Mr. Babalú” among the English-speaking public. But from Mexico south, Miguelito Valdes is still – to this day – known as “Mr. Babalú”.

This, however, is not your typical “inauthentic opportunist rips off authentic musician, and authentic musician dies poor” story. Miguelito Valdés enjoyed a rich career as the probably the single most popular Afro-Latin singer (in the spanish speaking world) well into the mid-1950s. He appeared in at least twelve Spanish language movies made in Mexico’s “Frijolywood” and was feted in Cuba, New York City, Panama and Mexico City. Max Salazar, the great journalist and documentor of Latin Music in New York, put Miguelito’s picture on the front cover of his book “Mambo Kingdom: Latin Music in New York.” Miguelito Valdés died in Bogotá, Colombia in 1978 while performing “Babalú” at the hotel Tequendama. When the full story of Afro-Latin music is told, his critical role will be recognized.